Saturday, December 1, 2012

IPL5 update and Regional Distribution

League of Legends IPL5:

As a follow-up to my previous update, the brackets have been updated as we are now out of the group stages. The losers bracket continues to be enormous and lengthy despite most of the games finishing 2-0 in a best of three.

But this article will instead focus on the Regional distribution between teams.

For the purposes of simplicity, all North American teams will simply be "American" even though many players are from Canada.

Originally, Let's look at the qualifications: 6/5/5 for 16 total teams. (TSM was IPL4 defenders and did not need to qualify, hence the weighted distribution.)
Now let us divide this into upper bracket directly after the group stages:
Upper Bracket: 2 American, 4 European, 2 Asian
Lower Bracket: 4 American, 1 European, 3 Asian

Clearly there is a skill desparity between regions. What is interesting though, was the "panic" that happened after the Season 2 championships, where American/European/Asian distribution went through the Quarter-, Semi-, and Grand-Finals as follows:
3/3/6
1/2/5
0/2/2
0/0/2

Many players began to worry that League of Legends was becoming an "asian" game of competition, such as StarCraft 2.

Let's get back to IPL5 though. As we advance into round 2, the distribution begins to shift a little, as Meat Playground pulls an upset to knock FeaR out of the tournament, and a second upset of Fnatic--a team that would not be in IPL5 if it weren't for Team Alternate dropping out--beating Taipei Assassins. After the first round of losers the following teams were knocked out: FeaR (upset), Team Dynamic, IceLanD, Black Bean. Most of which were expected. So with twelve team remaining it changes to: